World Cup 2014: at the Brazil finals a goggle-eyed man will be king

At the World Cup in Brazil hi-tech security measures will supplement more traditional policing methods. Photograph: Fernando Bizerra Jr/EPA

Perhaps the creepiest thing about the Sochi Winter Olympics – apart from the bit where it turned out they’d just been a curtain raiser for a land grab – was the use of a security system called VibraImage, which is a programme that analyses live images of people to assess whether they pose a security risk. According to the New York Times, it measures “tiny muscle vibrations in the head and neck known as vestibular-emotional reflexes”, and was used on all spectators “to detect someone who appears unremarkable but whose agitated mental state signals an imminent threat”.

Mmm. Back when he was still a science-fiction-writing insurance salesman, the Scientology founder, L Ron Hubbard, is said to have remarked: “If you want to get rich, start a religion.” Hubbard would go on to prove that thesis most resoundingly – and one of these days, I may set about trying to prove a theory of my own, which is that one of the best ways to fill your boots in the early 21st century is to set yourself up as an expert in sports security. The more biometric-sounding, the better.

I should point out that VibraImage has been deemed by some to be as amazingly effective as those £13 novelty golf ball finders marketed as bomb detectors in Iraq. Or indeed, as the early facial recognition software that was secretly brought in at vast expense to screen every attendee at the 2001 Super Bowl – thereafter nicknamed the Snooper Bowl – and which resulted in zero arrests, despite initial misleading claims by the firm who provided it.

“We passionately believe that face recognition improves personal privacy,” insisted its CEO – and 13 years of technological advances on, that trade-off seems to be a done deal for the Brazil World Cup. Considering the country’s security measures for Engineering and Technology magazine, a US facial recognition expert inquired rhetorically: “Do you want extra security or to protect people’s right to privacy?”

Depends who’s in charge, is the usual official answer. Apparently without irony, the US State department warned Americans planning to travel to Sochi to “understand that they have no expectation of privacy”. The US loyally held off casting similar aspersions before the London Olympics, despite our capital being the most surveilled city on earth and its Games preparation involving the “UK’s biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the Second World War”.

But then, nothing says major sporting event these days like the words “largest military operation in peacetime”. In fact, the only surprise is that Fifa and the International Olympic Committee have yet to trademark the phrase. (Incidentally, it wouldn’t be a World Cup if we didn’t highlight a few of the auto-satirical trademarks upon which Fifa has insisted, so you should know that this time round they have annexed “pagode” – an entire genre of Brazilian music – as well as Natal 2014. Natal is one of the tournament’s host cities – but it is also the word for Christmas, so please salute world football’s governing body for insisting its ownership of “Christmas 2014” lasts until 31 December.)

As far as military hardware goes, Brazil will naturally deploy fighter jets, and has splashed out some of the $900m security budget on 50 of the US military bomb-disposal robots used in Afghanistan, as well as two $12m Israeli drones to patrol the skies. The drone manufacturer describes its product as “perfectly suited for the homeland security challenges at these [sporting] events”.

Football, eh? Bloody hell.

Whether VibraImage will be used in Brazil is unclear – it is certainly rumoured to be, among sections of the security industry, with experts citing the traditional cooperation and copycatting between successive hosts of sporting mega-events.

What we do know for sure is that police patrolling the tournament will use facial-recognition goggles to scan people, with the glasses able to clock 400 faces a second and check them against a database of 13m. Thirteen million what, you may wonder – but alas, that has yet to be made clear in any of the breathlessly impressed, Robocop-referencing reports on the matter. According to its own PR, the system can scan targets up to 12 miles away. (Whether it can find your golf ball remains classified at present.)

Other known knowns for Brazil inform us that the traditional two-kilometre exclusion zones Fifa establishes around stadiums to shut out street vendors are apparently being upcycled into barriers designed to keep away any protesters, which would seem an escalation of sorts on behalf of the organisers and their Zurich overlords. Then again, at the last World Cup Fifa was finally able to trademark justice itself, via South Africa’s “Fifa World Cup Courts”, where people could commit a crime on a Wednesday and be sentenced to 15 years on the Friday.

In any sane world, it would be judged that the World Cup has become so financially and morally expensive that it would be far better for the tournament to be given a permanent residency somewhere, in the manner of a megastar fed up with touring being set up in Las Vegas. Qatar would seem the obvious choice, being deliciously unburdened by rights legislation and apparently so empty that in some cases entire cities are being constructed to stop some of the 2022 stadiums looking quite as preposterously lonesome or mirage-like as they might otherwise have done.

But the world, obviously, is far from sane. So we can only remark on sport’s increasing indispensability to the security-industrial complex, and look excited – but not suspiciously excited – about the mere subplot of a tournament to come.

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